Friday, July 22, 2011

This month, I've made some changes to the Naval Reactors History Database, hoping to build a foundation for linking with the small community of users who have committed time to creating Wikipedia entries and other info in social network spaces:

An NRHDBTwitter account, in which I post database-related info; Twitter users can indicate interest in the database by following this user

An embedded Twitter widget that displays the current NRHDB Twitter post

A Like button and the addition of microdata for the NRHDB site, consistent with Facebook's Open Graph Protocol

It will take some time for these changes to have an impact. The Facebook development work really opens up a lot of options for communication - as Eric Hellman of Gluejar pointed out in his ALA Annual presentation, the Like button is the most popular Semantic Web application. Its use establishes a number of methods for me to communicate with other Facebook users who have interest in the NRHDB, including messages and even ads.